Panorama Hotel Refurbishment/

Santorini island/2011

The existing hotel is a four storey building, built in the ‘60s on the Caldera (natural cliff) at Fira and is, architecturally, completely disrupting of the surrounding traditional settlement.
The design of the hotel refurbishment aims to restore this rupture, by transforming the building’s morphology to fortress-like. This is a reference to the old existing fortification buildings of the island, the only traditional buildings of relevant scale.
The building’s full-length volume is carved out, removing pieces of significant size and trying to address it as a complex of three smaller volumes, each of them of a different earth color.
The limited openings, are placed based on a morphological randomness, aiming in the creation of a more natural effect, congenital to the prosthetic principle of traditional Cycladic Architecture.
Most openings are inclined to directly face the view, with the inclination being imprinted to the volume’s surface itself, creating slanting areas around the openings.
As a result, the plasticity of form is intensified, the volume’s tectonic nature is enhanced and the building springs to life through the bright natural light of the Cyclades that casts intense, ever changing shadows, on the natural materials used, inspired by the island’s volcanic landscape.